Chief Engineer (Principal Engineer)

interface.ai•San Francisco, CA

1d•$335,000 - $375,000•Onsite

About The Position

interface.ai is the agentic AI platform for financial services, bringing conversational and agentic AI to credit unions and community banks. The company is in production, generating revenue, and aims to make intelligent financial services accessible. Over 100 banks and credit unions use interface.ai, reaching over 10 million people. With $30M in Series A funding and already cash-flow positive, interface.ai is rebuilding itself as an AI-native company to lead in a world where agents, not software, perform tasks. The role of Chief Engineer is the most senior technical track, focusing on leadership through technical credibility. Engineers on the team are senior and high-leverage due to AI handling routine tasks. This is an opportunity to own an entire domain of a profitable, category-leading AI company and shape the future of banking.

Requirements

A senior-most individual contributor (Principal / Distinguished level) or a hands-on technical founder — among the strongest technical builders you know.
You've built core systems in production at real scale — and ideally taken a hard, ambiguous bet from 0→1 or 0→GA, owning a company-defining system others depend on.
Category-defining range — you've built something others now build on top of, or owned a bet-the-company product under high ambiguity, and can articulate the tradeoffs at every layer.
Deep credibility in AI and agents (or in a domain's subject matter at comparable depth) — you set direction through technical authority and you are still, unmistakably, in the code.
Extreme AI fluency — you use frontier AI tools daily and have rebuilt how you and your team work around them.
First-principles problem-solving, exceptional learning velocity, and the judgment to operate at the company's hardest, highest-ambiguity seats.
BS/BA in Computer Science required.
San Francisco-based and committed to working onsite.

Nice To Haves

MS or PhD a strong plus.
Conversational AI, voice AI, or agentic systems built and run at production scale.
Fintech, banking, or regulated financial services background.
A 0→1 platform, system, or product that others went on to build on.
Published writing, conference talks, or open-source work in AI systems or platform engineering.

Responsibilities

Architecture and build: design systems for your domain and write code, setting the technical standard by example.
Technical bar: ship, review, and maintain quality and velocity across your domain's pods.
Engineers and leads in your domain: steer and unblock them, growing technical capability without becoming a pure manager.
Outcomes, with your Domain PM: deliver results and impact for your domain.
AI-native way of working: build on frontier models and embed AI development tools as standard practice.